Large enterprises are investing significant resources to maintain valid and functional data protection (DP) solutions in place. Data protection can entail various approaches and methodologies, including backup, archiving, disaster recovery, high availability, business continuity, application server clusters, load-balancing, virtualization and other service resiliency protecting resources in accordance with an enterprise's business protection requirements and the budget available. Users are looking for a solution that will help to verify that critical data, compute, communication and application elements are protected, and DP configuration can provide a reliable and safe switch to redundant computing resources in case of an unexpected disaster or service disruption.
The problem was recognized in the Prior Art and various systems were developed to provide a solution, for example:
US Patent Application No. 2004/64,436 (Breslin, Jodi et al.) published Apr. 1, 2004 and entitled “System and method for managing business continuity” discloses a system and method for developing, assessing testing and implementing plans and procedures for managing crisis events and providing continuity to business operations in cases of business interruption. Such business interruption can occur due to a variety of reasons including physical facility emergency. The continuity in business operations relates at least to real estate, and critical business resources such as computers, databases and applications. The system includes a core repository that manages, monitors and measures all core continuity processes across an institution (e.g., a corporation). Once an emergency has been identified, the system links the continuity plans to crisis team initiatives across the corporation. The system provides an executive level ‘state of health’ reporting facility to enable executives (managers) to assess the state of the business and the execution of the continuity plans in real time.
US Patent Application No. 2004/153,708 (Joshi, Darshan B. et al.) published Aug. 5, 2004 and entitled “Business continuation policy for server consolidation environment” discloses a method, computer program product and system that establishes and maintains a business continuity policy in a server consolidation environment. Business continuity is ensured by enabling a high availability of applications. When an application is started, restarted upon failure, or moved due to an overload situation, a system is selected best fulfilling the requirements for running the application. These requirements can include application requirements, such as an amount of available capacity to handle the load that will be placed on the system by the application. These requirements can further include system requirements, such as honoring a system limit of a number of applications that can be run on a particular system. Respective priorities of applications can be used to determine whether a lower-priority application can be moved to free resources for running a higher-priority application.
US Patent Application No. 2004/221,049 (Blumenau, Steve, et al.) published Nov. 4, 2004 and entitled “Method and apparatus for identifying network devices on a storage network” discloses a method and apparatus for managing the availability and assignment of data in a storage system that is coupled to a network. A user interface is provided that executes on a host processor that is coupled to the storage system over the network. The user interface communicates with a configuration database in the storage system to identify host processors that are logged into the storage system over the network, to identify storage volumes on the storage system, to identify whether access to a particular storage volume on the storage system is permitted from a particular host processor, and to identify a network path by which host processors are logged into the storage system over the network. In one embodiment, a graphical user interface is provided that can be used to graphically represent host processors, host bus adapters, storage systems, and storage system adapters and storage volumes on the storage system. The graphical representation provided by the graphical user interface permits a user to graphically view a topology of the network at varying levels of detail, selectable by the user. The graphical user interface also permits a user to allow or deny access to storage systems or a particular storage volume on storage system from one or more of the host processors, host bus adapters, etc., by selecting and manipulating graphical representations thereof.
US Patent Application No. 2004/243,699 (Kocklanes Mike; et al.) published Dec. 2, 2004 and entitled “Policy based management of stored resources” discloses a system and method of policy based management wherein service level objectives are associated with storage resource requestors such as applications. A set of policy rules is established in connection with these service level objectives. An update of the configuration of the storage network, such as a provisioning of storage resources for the application, is performed according to a workflow that implements the policy rules, which allows the service level objectives of the application to be automatically satisfied by the new provisioning. Metrics are used to ensure that service level objectives continue to be met.
US Patent Application No. 2005/144,062 (Mittal, Manish M.; et al.) published Jun. 30, 2005 and entitled “Business continuity information management system” discloses a system for implementing a corporate business continuity plan in which a plurality of governance rules are maintained and updated for one or more business locations. The governance rules establish business continuity responsibilities that are, in turn, assigned to designated employees for periodic or occasional action. Each designated employee is responsible for performing their assigned business continuity responsibilities and submitting statuses of such responsibilities to the system according to established timelines. One or more business continuity readiness indicators are then generated, based on the submitted statuses.
US Patent Application 2006/74,993 (Mulpuri Rajasekhar et al.) published Jun. 4, 2006 and entitled “System and method for management of recovery time objectives of business continuity/disaster recovery IT solutions” discloses a system and method for management of Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of a business continuity or disaster recovery solution. The system comprises a management server logically coupled with at least a first computer, at least a second computer, and a network coupling the first and the second computers. The first and second computers host at least one continuously available application, at least one data protection scheme for replicating the application data and at least one operating system; the application data being periodically replicated from the first computer to at least the second computer. The system manages RTO by inputting an RTO value for the solution, calculating a real time RTO value for the solution, and making the real time RTO value less than or equal to the input RTO value.
US Patent Application No. 2007/088763 discloses systems and processes for determining and validating accessibility and currency, i.e., the actual status, of data replicated in a networked environment are disclosed. According to the disclosed process, a replicated-data policy for replicating data is defined, and access paths between network devices or between applications running on the network devices are monitored, for example, by a replicated-data monitor. Also monitored are the data replication activities in the network. The currency, i.e., timeliness, and accessibility of a replica by a network device is then compared with the requirements in the replicated-data policy and discrepancies with the replicated-data policy are identified, optionally accompanied by a notification.
European Patent Application 1,526,679 (Leberre, Philippe) published Apr. 27, 2005 and entitled “Methods relating to the monitoring of computer systems” discloses a method of monitoring the condition of a computer system, comprising receiving performance data from the system, processing the data to estimate the likelihood of a deterioration in the condition of the system and providing an output which is dependent upon the estimated likelihood.